Blog

Join us on Wednesday, November 4 at City Hall for this special event, featuring planning directors from six cities, co-sponsored by SPUR and the San Francisco Planning Department. The evening's lineup includes:

A climate conference in Oxford concluded last week that whatever we can do to slow carbon emissions, it won't be enough to stop accelerated sea level rise. In fact, a German scientist who's widely regarded as one of the world's foremost experts on sea level rise, said his best guess was 1 meter this century (a lowball figure compared to the latest projections for California), and 5 meters in 300 years.

SPUR members toured the Mission Armory, the 200,000 square foot Moorish Castle Reproduction completed in 1914. From it's completion until 1976, the Armory was used as a National Guard facility, and later joined the National Register of Historic Places.

Some of the first calculations of the benefits of green roofs are coming back and they're even better than expected: replacing typical roofing materials with plants across a city the size of Detroit would be the equivalent of removing the pollution of 10,000 SUVs in a year.

Today was the second day of the six-week Better Market Street Project trial number one, which diverts cars headed north off of Market Street at 8th and 6th avenues, in an attempt to reduce traffic on the oft-clogged street. What a transformation! The morning bicycle commute has become a breeze and we hope will encourage more workers to choose their two-wheeled vehicle.

Two weeks ago the great parade of cars covered in the white desert dust returned from Black Rock City, Nevada, Burning Man's annual week-long home. Along with the many tales, burners brought back news of next year's theme: Metropolis: the life of cities.

This summer, somewhere in California, the state Energy Commission denied an application for a new urban natural gas-burning power plant, citing that urban solar (PV) might be a better alternative. The CEC said that new "peakers" were not obviously the most cost-effective or environmentally preferable option to close that city's energy reliability gap. For years, SPUR and a loose coalition of environmental advocates, led by the...

New York Times columnist Allison Arieff penned a piece yesterday on the temporary parks and open spaces sprouting up in San Francisco and New York City--and the opportunity for land owners (in this soft economy) to lend their empty lots to grassroots greeners.

NRDC has just released a guide to SB 375, the nation's first legislation to link transportation and land use planning with global warming. The goal of this legislation is to foster development patterns that reduce the need to drive. Household transportation is the single largest and fastest-growing source of global warming pollution in California.

Our friends at the Sightline Institute in Cascadia have put together a primer on the federal climate bill, aka the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), aka Waxman-Markey, that passed the U.S.

Times Square has under gone a transformation lately, with lounge chairs replacing traffic and conversations replacing honking taxis. This coned-off chunk off Broadway is one of a number of experiments with public space happening around the city.

Earlier this month, after ten years of advocacy from neighbors, activists and artists alike, the first of three sections of New York's High Line park opened for visitors. The 1.45 mile-long park is situated on a defunct 19th century elevated train track that used to carry cattle into the Meatpacking District, but had been left standing since 1980, when nature adopted it, and turned it wild with gr

The UK Guardian recently reported from beleaguered Flint, Mich., on a new plan to shrink the city by actually bulldozing unused buildings and neighborhoods. The idea is to concentrate the dwindling population and city services into a smaller area, or as Detroit has envisioned, many smaller urban centers separated by "forests and meadows&

We're nearly done installing SPUR's first exhibition, Agents of Change: Civic Idealism and the Making of San Francisco. Here's a sneak peak of how it's shaping up—thanks to an amazing cadre of volunteers who have been working around the clock to get the show installed before it opens this Friday.

We're nearly done installing SPUR's first exhibition, Agents of Change: Civic Idealism and the Making of San Francisco. Here's a sneak peak of how it's shaping up—thanks to an amazing cadre of volunteers who have been working around the clock to get the show installed before it opens this Friday.